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I was reading a paper titled "An Optimized Web Feed Aggregation Approach for Generic Feed Types" and googles PubSubHubbub protocol was discussed and the paper stated its drawback something like

Furthermore, there are patch systems such as pubsubhubbub (Google 2010) which can be seen as a mod-erator between feed readers and servers. All of these solutions only work if both, client and server support the extensions, which is rarely the case. Pubsubhubbub, for example,is only supported by 2 % of the feeds in our dataset.

I have never really interacted with this protocol , does it require clients (subscribers) to have some sort of a software on their system like feed listeners are required on the client side(subscribers) for obtaining feeds (is that what the above means) ?

Dan Lowe
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Rajeshwar
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1 Answers1

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I am not sure where they pulled that 2% number from, but it is probably not right. For example, all the major blogging platforms support PubSubHubbub. A lot of news outlets (HuffPo, Gawker, Foxnews, ABCLocal...) support the protocol too. Many other services, like Craigslist, Getglue, (even StackOverflow) . A lot of other services, like Github or Instagram do support PubSubHubbub-like APIs for JSON resources, even though this is outside of the current (0.3) spec. The list goes on and on and on.

Now as far as complexity, it really isn't that difficult for a huge benefit. The "clients" (technically these are web servers) need to visible, accessible outside the firewall. For publishers, it is even easier as they just need to ping (a simple HTTP POST request) the hub that they've chosen previously.

Julien Genestoux
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